Produced by David Widger
LITERATURE AND LIFE—The Man of Letters as a Man of Business
by William Dean Howells
Perhaps the reader may not feel in these papers that inner solidaritywhich the writer is conscious of; and it is in this doubt that the writerwishes to offer a word of explanation. He owns, as he must, that theyhave every appearance of a group of desultory sketches and essays,without palpable relation to one another, or superficial allegiance toany central motive. Yet he ventures to hope that the reader who makeshis way through them will be aware, in the retrospect, of something likethis relation and this allegiance.
For my own part, if I am to identify myself with the writer who is hereon his defence, I have never been able to see much difference betweenwhat seemed to me Literature and what seemed to me Life. If I did notfind life in what professed to be literature, I disabled its profession,and possibly from this habit, now inveterate with me, I am never quitesure of life unless I find literature in it. Unless the thing seenreveals to me an intrinsic poetry, and puts on phrases that clothe itpleasingly to the imagination, I do not much care for it; but if it willdo this, I do not mind how poor or common or squalid it shows at firstglance: it challenges my curiosity and keeps my sympathy. Instantly Ilove it and wish to share my pleasure in it with some one else, or asmany ones else as I can get to look or listen. If the thing is somethingread, rather than seen, I am not anxious about the matter: if it is likelife, I know that it is poetry, and take it to my heart. There can be nooffence in it for which its truth will not make me amends.
Out of this way of thinking and feeling about these two great things,about Literature and Life, there may have arisen a confusion as to whichis which. But I do not wish to part them, and in their union I havefound, since I learned my letters, a joy in them both which I hope willlast till I forget my letters.
"So was it when my life began;
So is it, now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old."
It is the rainbow in the sky for me; and I have seldom seen a sky withoutsome bit of rainbow in it. Sometimes I can make others see it, sometimesnot; but I always like to try, and if I fail I harbor no worse thought ofthem than that they have not had their eyes examined and fitted withglasses which would at least have helped their vision.
As to the where and when of the different papers, in which I supposetheir bibliography properly lies, I need not be very exact. "The Man ofLetters as a Man of Business" was written in a hotel at Lakewood in theMay of 1892 or 1893, and pretty promptly printed in Scribner's Magazine;"Confessions of a Summer Colonist" was done at York Harbor in the fall of1898 for the Atlantic Monthly, and was a study of life at that pleasantresort as it was lived-in the idyllic times of the earlier settlement,long before motors and almost before private carriages; "AmericanLiterary Centres," "American Literature in Exile," "Puritanism inAmerican Fiction," "Politics of American Authors," were, with three orfour other papers, the endeavors of the American correspondent of theLondon Times's literary supplement, to enlighten the Britishunderstanding as to our ways of thinking and writing eleven years ago,and are here left to bear the defects of the qualities of their obsoleteactuality in the year 1899. Most of the studies and sketches are from anextinct department of "Life and Letters" which I invented for Harper'sWeekly, and operated for a year or so toward the close